TikTok Vs. Instagram: Algorithm Comparison
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47611/jsrhs.v11i1.2428Keywords:
Algorithm, Social media, Photo-based platform, Video-based platformAbstract
TikTok and Instagram are two of the most popular social media platforms on the market. They do, however, have one important distinguishing factor: TikTok is a video-sharing platform and Instagram is a photo-sharing platform. With fundamentally different functions, the algorithms are bound to be different. This study focuses on which algorithm between the two social media platforms does better at sending out content made to an interested audience.
To see which algorithm performs better, two accounts were created on TikTok and Instagram respectively, and there were ten posts made on each account, with each post on one account being focused on the same subject as a corresponding post on the other (ie. A video post of a flower on TikTok will have a corresponding photo post of the same flower on Instagram). A set of posts would be uploaded at the same time and any given set of posts' statistics would be recorded and reviewed after one week of being uploaded.
Using a comparison of the results garnered from each post on both platforms, including individual views and total views, it is concluded that the algorithm TikTok uses is superior in regards to showing specifically tagged content to potentially interested users. The number of both individual views and total views of the TikTok posts were much higher than the ones for Instagram, with TikTok’s numbers reaching the hundreds and Instagram never breaking into double digits.
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Copyright (c) 2022 Kelsey Bishqemi; Dr. Michael Crowley
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